In at the Death (Marcus Corvinus Book 11)

by David Wishart

  ‘Another thing it doesn’t explain is the peripheral detail.’

  ‘Uh...come again?’

  ‘Balbus and Carsidius, for a start. Marcus, they’re honourable men! Oh, yes, perhaps honourable only in senatorial terms, but that’s amply sufficient here. For your theory to work, they’d both have to be hand-in-glove with Ahenobarbus, and if he were engaged in some sort of illegal activity then that doesn’t make sense. Not to me, at any rate. Both of them lied to you over the bribery issue, and in neither case - unless they were involved with Ahenobarbus in a cover-up - was it necessary.’ She straightened a fold in her mantle. ‘I’m sorry, but if that’s your theory then it has too many holes.’

  Bugger. Right again, and I couldn’t even put hand on heart and say there was a scam to cover up in the first place. Stymied. I sank the last of the wine in my cup. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave that aspect of things for now. Where do I go next?’

  She sniffed. ‘I would’ve thought it was obvious.’

  ‘Really?’ I reached for the jug. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Acutia.’

  I shrugged. ‘Okay. Although on present showing I can’t exactly see the lady being willing to spill any beans. If she is involved somewhere along the line, then –’

  ‘Marcus, why must you always be so direct?’

  ‘Fine, Aristotle. In that case, you tell me.’

  ‘You’ve got your Caelius Crispus. I’ve got Sergia Plauta.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your mother’s friend. The dowager; remember?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I’d never actually met Plauta myself - Mother’s pals can be pretty wearing at close range - but I’d heard both Mother and Perilla talking about her. Sergia Plauta was your echt blue-blood society matron, six steps to the right of Sulla and a force to be reckoned with in the honey-wine-klatsch set. ‘You reckon she can help?’

  ‘I’ll be very surprised if she can’t. Plauta’s the biggest source of female gossip in Rome. She’s also - and I don’t often use the term, Marcus - a complete cat. Yes, I think she could help a great deal. If properly approached.’

  ‘Not directly?’

  Perilla smiled. ‘Not directly. Leave it to me, dear. I’ll invite myself round tomorrow.’

  ‘Hey, that’s great!’ I refilled my cup and took a slug of the Setinian: the world was suddenly a brighter place. ‘See if you can find out –’

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  I turned round. Bathyllus had oozed in on my blind side.

  ‘Yes, little guy, what is it?’

  ‘A slave has just come with a message. From Mucius Soranus.’ That with a slight sniff: like I said, Bathyllus has standards. He’d probably had the poor bugger disinfected at the door.

  I set down the wine-cup. ‘Is that so, now?’ I said carefully.

  ‘Yes, sir. The gentleman wants to meet you. Tomorrow morning at dawn. In Pompey’s theatre.’

  ‘He what?’ I goggled. Perilla was staring.

  ‘That’s what the man said. I did think myself it was a little odd, but –’

  ‘Jupiter’s bloody immortal balls! At dawn? He say what it was about?’

  ‘No, sir. I asked, of course, but he didn’t know. He’d only been told to take the verbal message.’

  ‘Don’t go, Marcus!’ Perilla said.

  Yeah, that was my first reaction too. A dawn meeting at Pompey’s theatre just didn’t make sense. If everything was on the level then the bastard could’ve asked me round to his house at a civilised hour, although given how we’d parted on the last occasion I couldn’t think what the hell he’d have to say to me. Something stank like a week-old codfish.

  ‘The guy’s still here? The slave, I mean?’ I said.

  ‘No, sir. He delivered the message and left. I said you’d want to speak to him personally, but –’

  ‘Okay. Okay, Bathyllus.’ I waved him away. ‘You did your best. Go and polish your spoons.’ He exited. ‘Gods!’ I reached for the wine-cup.

  ‘Marcus, you aren’t going to go, are you?’ Perilla said.

  ‘Sure I am. What choice do I have?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’

  I was thinking. I’d go, sure - I had to, it might be important - but I wouldn’t go alone. No way would I go alone, not the way things were shaping. Forget Placida this time, she was too unreliable. Half a dozen of my biggest lads with weighted sticks were another matter; and Soranus’s message - if it was Soranus’s - hadn’t mentioned anything about a solo interview.

  If the meeting was above-board, though - and I’d put that in the flying pigs category - then it was going to be interesting.

  24

  I was up in good time, two hours before dawn at least; to tell the truth, I hadn’t slept all that much. Perilla was awake and around too. She hadn’t slept much either.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said as she kissed me goodbye.

  ‘You’ve got it, lady.’ I checked the knife taped to my forearm - carrying a sword inside the city limits is strictly illegal, and I was in enough trouble already - and whistled up the Wrecking Crew. They were the biggest, meanest half dozen Bathyllus’s team of skivvies could provide, built like the doors on the State Treasury and more than twice as thick. Mind you, I wasn’t taking them for their powers of conversation. Apropos of which: ‘Okay, boys? All got your sticks?’

  ‘Yeah, boss.’ The leader grinned. He’d lost a few teeth here and there, but the effect was balanced by his broken nose and shaved head.

  ‘Fine. So let’s go walkies.’

  Pompey’s theatre is the other side of the Capitol, in Mars Field near Tiberius Arch; in other words, a long hike from the Caelian. We weren’t bothering with torches: there was a full moon, no footpad in his right mind was going to cross six very hefty buggers just begging for the chance to try out their new toys, and in any case in the lead-up to dawn the streets were full of wheeled carts making their deliveries and plain-tunics en-route to work. We got some strange looks on the way over - you don’t see purple-stripers out and about much before the second hour - but again because of the Wrecking Crew most punters gave us the pavement to ourselves. The sky was just beginning to lighten when we reached the Temple of Hercules and the Muses just shy of the theatre complex.

  The doors of the theatre were open. That was my first surprise. The second, when I went inside, was that there were no slaves about. That was weird. An open door in a public building first thing in the morning means the bought help are up and around polishing the floors or sweeping the steps and generally making sure that the place is respectable and heart-of-the-empire standard. Not a soul. Zero. Zilch.

  I checked that my knife was loose in its sheath, motioned the Wrecking Crew to stick close behind, and climbed the stairs to the auditorium. The sun was up now, although it was hidden by the Capitol rise, and when I got out into the open air I could see clearly along the ranks of seats. No one. Nothing.

  Shit.

  Fair enough. There was no point in skulking around. I put my hands round my mouth and shouted: ‘Soranus!’

  A flock of sparrows flew out of the cavea to one side of the stage far below me. Nothing else moved. Bugger; it had been a wasted journey.

  Or had it?

  I looked down at the stretch of paving that separated the stage proper from the lowest half-circle of seats. In front of the raised stage platform, at ground level, there was a line of statues. Propped against one of them was...

  The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Trouble, boss?’ That was the head slave of the Wrecking Crew. He sounded pleased.

  ‘Down we go, lads,’ I said. ‘Keep your eyes skinned.’

  Yeah, sure; it could’ve been one of the theatre skivvies sleeping on the job: he was too far away for me to see his face clearly. And pigs might fly.

  I went down the gangway to the senatorial seats, lowered myself carefully over the barrier onto the orchestra floor, and crossed towards the stage platform. The Wre
cking Crew followed.

  Yeah, that was Soranus all right, and he was definitely an ex-blackmailer: his throat had been cut ear to ear. No blood, though, on the paving-stones at least, barring a couple of smears. This corpse had been dumped. Well, I couldn’t say it was altogether unexpected; the whole setup had stunk from the beginning, and a corpse at the end of it had been one of the possibilities.

  It’s funny how your mind registers little things at a time like this. For me, then, it was the bare knees of the statue above him. Diana the Huntress, in her short dress and wreath, poised and about to throw her javelin. The statue looked quite new, the bronze hardly tarnished. Soranus’s head was propped against the goddess’s legs.

  Then I noticed something odd. Yeah, well, you know what I mean.

  The guy’s right arm was stretched out straight in front of him and to one side, the hand clenched into a fist and resting knuckles-down on the orchestra floor, like he was holding something out towards me. I reached down and prised the fingers apart: either he hadn’t begun to stiffen properly yet or he’d been killed quite a while ago, because they opened fairly easily.

  Soranus was holding a silver piece.

  I sat back on my heels to think. Bugger; what was going on here? It got weirder by the minute. If the body had been dumped, as it had, then why –?

  ‘Sir! Sir!’

  I looked round. An old guy - obviously a slave, from his tunic - was hobbling towards me along the line of the platform. I reached down and took the coin from Soranus’s hand, then stood up to wait for him.

  ‘You’re Valerius Corvinus, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Uh...yeah. Yeah, that’s me.’ Jupiter! Weird was right! ‘How the hell –?’

  ‘I was told to wait for you, sir.’ The guy was white and shaking, and it wasn’t just old age, either. ‘Until you’d found the –’ His eyes slid to what was left of Soranus, then back to my face. Whatever he saw there can’t exactly have been reassuring, because he took a step back. ‘Believe me, sir, I didn’t...I had nothing to do with...’

  ‘You want us to beat him up, boss?’ The head of the Wrecking Crew again. I had to hand it to these guys. They’d taken finding a dead man with his throat slit in their stride like it happened every day of the month. Not a grunt from any of them. Phlegmatic isn’t the word. Maybe ‘bovine’ covered it.

  ‘No. No, that’s okay,’ I said. Then, to the slave: ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They brought the body in a cart, sir, about an hour ago. I was...I sleep in one of the booths beside the entrance. They must’ve known that, sir, because they woke me up and told me to open the door.’ His teeth were chattering. The fact that the Wrecking Crew to a troll were standing close beside him fondling their sticks can’t’ve helped his confidence that he’d come out the other side of this intact much either.

  ‘You’re the caretaker?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Almost all my life, ever since the Divine Augustus rebuilt the theatre, sir.’ His hand pawed at my tunic. ‘Sir, I’ve told you the gods’ truth! Don’t let me be tortured! I didn’t kill him!’

  ‘Look, no one’s going to torture you, pal, okay?’ I said. ‘Right. So who were “they”?’

  ‘Two men, sir. Big-built, about your age, sir, or a bit older. One called the other Quintus. They said if I called the Watch before you came, or if I warned you, they’d come back and...Sir, I don’t know any more! Please!’

  No, he probably didn’t, and he was obviously close to wetting himself as it was. No point in terrorising the guy further. Besides, I knew who the killers were: they hadn’t made any secret of it, quite the reverse. Which was weird in itself. ‘It’s okay, pal,’ I said. ‘You’re off the hook. Go and call the Watch now. Oh, and they’ll want to know the dead man’s name. Tell them Mucius Soranus. He lives - lived - over on the Cipian near Livia Porch.’

  ‘And...I know your name, sir, but you live..?’

  ‘On the Caelian, foot of Head of Africa. They can find me if they want to. I doubt they’ll bother, though.’ Not if the head of the Ninth Region Watch was anything like Titus bloody Mescinius, that was. Gods! What a mess!

  Well, there wasn’t much more I could do here, was there?

  Home.

  . . .

  Perilla was waiting. She ran across the atrium floor and hugged me tightly. She was white as an unused dishrag.

  ‘You’re all right?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. No problems.’

  ‘What happened? Did you see Soranus?’

  I unpeeled her. ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Yes and no?’

  I told her.

  ‘It was your stonemasons?’ she said when I’d finished. ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Couldn’t be anyone else. The whole thing was a setup. Surprise surprise.’ I stretched out on the couch and poured a cup of Setinian from the jug Bathyllus had handed me at the door. ‘Never mind. At least I didn’t get killed or beaten up.’

  ‘Marcus, don’t joke! Please!’

  ‘Well, it was always a possibility. Still, that wasn’t the purpose of the exercise, was it?’

  ‘No.’ She gave a little shiver and sat down on the couch opposite, hands clenched. ‘So what was, do you think?’

  ‘Search me. Some sort of message, sure, that much is obvious. But what kind? A warning? “Lay off or you’ll be next”?’

  ‘Marcus!’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  The lady had got a bit of her colour back, although she still didn’t look exactly happy and her fingers were still wound together. ‘Your pseudo-stonemasons,’ she said. ‘What were their names again?’

  ‘Aponius and Pettius. At least, those were the names they gave me.’

  ‘Yes. They did save your life last time. That doesn’t fit with a warning, does it?’

  ‘Nothing about this case fucking fits!’

  ‘Gently, dear. There’s no point in getting angry.’ She took a deep breath and let it out. ‘Or upset.’ Her fingers untwined themselves. ‘Let’s be logical. If it wasn’t a warning, then what kind of message was it?’

  ‘Jupiter, Perilla, I already said, I don’t know! Anyway, what kind of sick brain sends messages using a corpse?’

  ‘It isn’t just that. The whole situation is...odd.’

  ‘You’re telling me.’ I took a swallow of wine. Nectar! All the way to Mars Field and back in a morning had left me with a throat dry as a leather strap.

  Perilla was looking pensive and twisting at her hair. Good sign; a thinking Perilla I can cope with. The other kind makes me nervous.

  ‘To begin with, why Pompey’s theatre?’ she said. ‘Soranus was practically a neighbour of ours. They could have left his body anywhere. Why choose the other side of Rome, especially if the whole point was simply to have you find it?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I was wondering that myself. Maybe it was just a quiet, out-of-the-way place.’

  ‘There are quiet, out-of-the-way places far closer to the Caelian than Mars Field, Marcus, especially at that time of the morning. Besides, Pompey’s theatre isn’t exactly isolated.’

  ‘Okay. Then maybe he was killed close by. Decoyed to somewhere in the neighbourhood some time yesterday, bumped off and shelved for delivery first thing. Certainly that explains the dawn meeting. They’d have to use a cart to transport the body, and that means a dusk-to-dawn timeslot.’

  ‘It’s possible. But still, the distance wouldn’t matter. They’d have all night to do it, and it’s unlikely they’d be stopped by the Watch because from sunset to first light the streets are full of carts. Besides, if the murder was committed nearby they wouldn’t want to advertise the fact.’

  ‘Okay, Aristotle.’ I took another sip of the wine. ‘I’m open to suggestions.’

  She took a long time answering. Then she said slowly: ‘I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s more of a code. Or a puzzle.’

  ‘Jupiter’s holy balls, lady! Why should guys like Aponius and Pettius set me a puzzle? They’re sodding –’
<
br />   ‘Marcus. Stop it, please. I don’t mean the actual killers, of course I don’t. I mean whoever sent them, whoever was behind the murder. Mind you, to be honest I don’t see why they should bother either. This isn’t a game.’

  ‘Too right it isn’t! Bloody hell!’ I reached for the jug.

  ‘Nevertheless.’ Perilla’s hand went back to her curl. ‘Just calm down and let’s think. Pompey’s theatre. What’s special about Pompey’s theatre?’

  I grinned. ‘You’re on your own there, sunshine.’

  ‘Very well. It’s the oldest stone theatre in Rome, originally built by Pompey on the model of the theatre at Mytilene and renovated by Augustus. Anything else?’

  ‘Perilla –’

  ‘All right. Perhaps not that, then. Theatres in general. What do they call to mind?’

  ‘Actors? Acting? Plays?’ I frowned. ‘Tragedies. Comedies. Masks.’

  ‘Fine. That’s better. Masks. People pretending to be someone they’re not. Acting out a play that isn’t real. Possible? Anything suggest itself?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Besides, the body wasn’t on the stage.’

  ‘Ah. Good point.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t helping, lady.’

  ‘No. No, perhaps it isn’t.’ The curl knotted, and she began prising the hairs apart with her fingernails. ‘But there must be something.’

  ‘He was leaning against a statue.’ The fingernails stopped. Her mouth opened, then closed. ‘Perilla?’

  ‘No. It was just a...’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind, it’ll come again if it’s important. What kind of statue? Who to?’

  ‘Diana. Diana as Huntress.’

  ‘So a woman’s statue?’

  ‘Of course a fucking –!’

  ‘Marcus! Hunting. Women.’ The tangle came free. ‘Anything significant there, do you think?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’

  ‘Think metaphorically, dear. This is a puzzle, remember. Soranus was a blackmailer, women are a natural target - quarry - for blackmailers. And Diana doesn’t have a good reputation where men trespassing on her private affairs is concerned. The hunting goes both ways. Remember Actaeon?’